Under the Spell of the Druids

By Ronald Hutton | Published in History Today Volume: 59 Issue: 5 2009

Historical facts about the Druids are few, yet this very lack of tangible evidence has allowed their image to be reworked and appropriated by the English, Irish, Scots and Welsh for over 500 years. Ronald Hutton examines the modern history of an ancient order.

The word ‘Druid’ was one given to experts in magical and religious practice by the peoples speaking Celtic languages who inhabited northwestern Europe around 2,000 years ago. That is all that can definitely be said about it. Those who have tried to say more have relied on two different groups of sources. The smaller, but more famous of those groups consists of the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans. These have the virtue of being the work of people who lived when Druids still existed. Their problem is that almost all relied on secondhand information of unknown quality, much of it very old even by their time. Moreover, none wrote more than a few sentences about Druids.

The only one of these writers who could have encountered them himself was Julius Caesar, who conquered Gaul – present-day France, Belgium and the Rhineland – for the Roman Empire. In a famous passage he describes the Druids of Gaul as having great power and learning and being united in a national organisation under a single leader. No other ancient author credits Druids with this degree of sophistication. Furthermore, his famous description of them is isolated amid detailed accounts of the wars in which he conquered Gaul. If the Druids had been anything like as powerful and well organised as Caesar insisted them to be, they should have featured constantly in those wars, yet they never appear in them at all. Many modern authors, therefore, have charged him with exaggerating the importance and organisation of the Gallic Druids. By doing so he made the Gauls seem more dangerous and more worthy as adversaries and so his own conquest more glorious.

This article is available to History Today online subscribers only. If you are a subscriber, please log in.

Please choose one of these options to access this article:

Purchase a online subscription and receive unlimited access to our archive for one week, one month or a year

Purchase a print and website subscription, giving you one year's access to all our content and 12 editions of History Today magazine.

If you are already a print subscriber, purchase the online archive upgrade for a year's worth of access at a reduced price

Call our Subscriptions department on +44 (0)20 3219 7813 for more information.

If you are logged in but still cannot access the article, please contact us

Tags: Europe,

If you enjoyed this article, you might like these:

This Month's Magazine

Subscribe to our weekly e-newsletter:

From The Current Issue

History Today App

From The Archive

Lords of the Northern Forest

The Hudson's Bay Company was one of the central forces moulding the development of the vast tracts of land that today are Canada - but as Barry Gough explains here, the circumstances of its launch in 1670 also reveal much about the commercial forces, personalities and rivalries of Restoration England.